Outside Sales Hiring Tips

An outside sales person can be a great addition to your business. This salesperson is going to work to obtain and nurture accounts with commercial cutters and municipalities.

As you look to add an outside salesperson to your business, consider the following tips about vetting, compensation and management.

Expectations and compensation

Define your expectations of your new sales person. An outside sales person is expected to manage their time wisely between existing customers and cold-calling on new accounts. It's very important to put some really solid parameters on what you expect from your outside salesperson and how you're going to measure their success.

Before you bring somebody in as a sales person, you want to have a real clear idea of the numbers that they need to generate. Calculate how much they need to make each year, month, week and day. Discover their average sale per customer and how many customers they need to call on each week to achieve the sales numbers needed.

On average, an outside sales person needs to produce $1.2 to $1.5 million in wholegoods sales. This should cover their salary, job costs and earn the dealership a profit.

An outside sales person will likely end up working atypical, long hours. It best to pay them a salary over an hourly wage, with additional sales commission. An outside sales person should be paid more than an inside sales person who is handling day-to-day traffic that comes into the business as a result of marketing and advertising.

Personality and Experience

An outside salesperson needs to possess certain qualities to succeed. There are several personality assessment tools available to help you learn if a job candidate has what it takes to be an outside sales person. An aggressive people person is the best candidate. Some other notable characteristics of successful sales people include:

Conscientiousness

Achievement-oriented

Curious

Uneasily discouraged

Self-confident

If an individual doesn’t have any industry knowledge, don’t count them out. Successful selling is not about product knowledge, but people knowledge. It is easy to teach the product side of any business, but much harder to teach a person how to understand and read people.

Bob Clements is the president of Bob Clements International, a consulting firm that specializes in the development of high-performance dealerships. His organization works hands on with dealerships throughout North America, helping them attain the personal freedom and financial wealth all entrepreneurs strive to achieve.